The Simpsons are Cool but Barbie's a Minger - Professor Agnes Nairn

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STAGE 2
STAGE 2 – OBJECTIVES
Stage 2 took place 6 months after stage 1. We returned to the same schools and talked
with children from the same age groups (although not necessarily the same children). We
again used small group discussion settings for our data collection, but this time the group
sizes were smaller consisting of 3 or 4 children. We decided to use smaller groups as 6
would have been too many for the sorting task. Again, half of the children were age 7/8
(year 3) and half 10/11 (year 6). A quarter of the groups were girls only, a quarter boys only
and half mixed gender. In total, 16 discussions with a total of 56 children were held in a
quiet room in each school. Parental permission was gained for children to take part and for
the discussions to be both taped and videoed. Digital photographs of the results of the
sorting task were also taken.
The purpose of stage 2 was to explore the meanings of brands in greater depth. This time
we had four over-riding criteria in the design of the research:
1) We again wanted to ensure that the products, brands and media influences studied
were those which children saw as meaningful rather than objects that we as adult
researchers thought would be meaningful to children. We imposed no suggestions for
brands on the discussions.
2) We again wanted to understand how children themselves construct meaning from
consumption objects. (Previous research had concentrated on testing whether
children can interpret the adult world or whether children of different ages assign the
same fixed meaning to consumption objects.) We made no suggestions for how
particular brands might be viewed by others.
3) We again wanted to explore how the children reacted in groups rather than
individually. (Whilst the process of assigning meanings to objects is a deeply social
process, children’s individual interpretations have been the focus of previous research).
4) In Stage 2 we also wished to explore in greater depth the complex group negotiation
process we observed in stage 1 when children were deciding whether items were
“cool” or “not cool”. This was important as this “negotiation process” is not
something which has been reported from other research.